Since the walls of the barrel parts of direct blow bottles generally have such high flexibility that contents can be easily discharged by squeezing, the direct blow bottles are widely used as plastic containers for containing various contents such as foods, cosmetics and haircare products (for example, shampoo and rinse).
Although the metallic decoration of the appearances of plastic containers is adopted as means for enhancing the commodity value of the plastic containers, metallic decoration is limited to high price goods such as cosmetic containers.
That is, for the metallic decoration of the appearance of a plastic container, the coating film of a metal pigment is formed on the outer surface of a container by spray coating the metal pigment, or a shrink film is formed by gravure printing a metal pigment to cover the outer surface of a container therewith. These means require the step of coating each container and the step of carrying a treatment with the shrink film, resulting in a high cost. Therefore, metallic decoration cannot be substantially applied to for example inexpensive containers for haircare products.
As a matter of course, to carry out metallic decoration at a low cost, for example, Patent Document 1 proposes master batch system in which a bottle having a layer decorated with a metal pigment is formed by the direct blow molding of a resin for forming a container mixed with a master batch prepared by kneading a flaky metal pigment into a resin. This master batch system makes it possible to carry out metallic decoration at a lower cost than the aforementioned spray coating system and shrink film system. However, the metallic appearance is not satisfactory in this case, and it is desired to further enhance the metallic appearance.
Further, the aforementioned shrink film system has a disadvantage that the shape of a container is limited to a straight cylindrical shape or a shape close to it.